Another Perspective

[KATPILOT]

It's exactly the same thing Ana. Marriage is not the criteria for loving someone. You can love someone for all of time if that's who you are.

[mik]

LC and I lived together. He gave me a "black diamond", not your typical "engagement ring"  I will always wear it. I also wear his ashes in a heart shaped necklace to remind me (like I would forget!) that he is always beside me.  I will never take them off, regardless of what happens in my future.

[kayc]

Ana, it's the bond within the heart that binds us together, not a piece of paper...millions of divorces attest to that.  While I was so glad when we got married, our bond was cemented long before that.

[Brad]

[scba]

21 hours ago, KATPILOT said:

It's exactly the same thing Ana. Marriage is not the criteria for loving someone. You can love someone for all of time if that's who you are.

 

10 hours ago, kayc said:

Ana, it's the bond within the heart that binds us together, not a piece of paper...millions of divorces attest to that.  While I was so glad when we got married, our bond was cemented long before that.

Thank you both. 

[Margm]

Ana, my son and his girlfriend have been together 10 years.  I come from an older place in time than you young people.  

[kayc]

Marg,

I wish you'd quit referring to yourself as old, you're not!  Unless you're 100 (and I know you aren't), you aren't there yet.  Maybe you FEEL old sometimes, I think we all do!

[Margm]

I wasn't old until Billy left.  I never thought in years.  I also was never sedentary and I've gotten that way.  I think being still makes one old, if they are young.  My sister told me when she was a teenager I came from a different generation as I was almost nine years older than she.  She and I seem to be of the same generation now, sometimes I think she is older than I am.  I have had this happen lately, and I hope it is just a phase of the grief process and I will get out of it.  I've always been afraid of the dark (not so much the dark, as what I cannot see). 

I get to thinking I am feeling better.  I have had life-long depression, but Kay Redfield Jamison, (Her husband was PhD, researcher, teacher, author, her "keeper.")  He made tapes of her moods for research.  (He passed away and she wrote a book called, I think, "Nothing's the Same." She is an author, teacher, researcher, who is bipolar and knows the depths of depression, she said it so much better than I can. "I knew depression to be unrelenting, invariable, impervious to event.  I knew its pain to be undeviating.  Grief was different.  It hit in waves, caught me unawares.  It struck when I felt most alive, when I thought I had moved beyond its hold.  I am so much better dealing with his being gone, I would say to myself, assured by some new pleasure in life.  Then I would be flung far and cold by a wave of longing I could scarcely stand."  Yet a few years later she married again.  I'm so tired of grief, don't want this grief again, a second layer.

And, I bought my Ferris Yaris tiny car to make it where I could roam the countryside like I always liked to do.  Going nowhere, anywhere, not far from the apartment.  It was a freedom I cannot define.  Now I have tried it twice and such terror gripped me I had to hurry back to the apartment.  

This is a "stage" that I don't understand, but I am slowly getting my concentration back, so maybe this crazy terror will subside.  I think being afraid makes you feel old too.  

Last night It came up on my FB that I should be "friends" with someone I don't know, but by reputation. She has been married three times.  One she divorced, one died of a heart attack at about 54, she married again, married to him about 20 years and he died of cancer.  Fact of life, we are born and then we die.  I cannot imagine going through this twice.  And yet it is a different grief than losing a child, I hope I am gone before that happens.  My aunt is so mired down in depression, my beautiful aunt who kept her mother living in her own little apartment, her dad (my granddad) died when she was a teenager (no one mourned him....sad), her sister she had lived next door to for years and years (she was 90, but looked and acted much younger), I cried and cried for this woman, she left one February 1st, Billy left in October, my dad, her oldest brother, her husband (who was living with another woman at the time) and her beautiful daughter who got into alcoholism and could not slow that train down.  (She died in her 16-year-old son's arms). It all went downhill.  She is a shut-in now and everyone is worried about her.  Friends everywhere (she has a disposition like a rattlesnake), but it is a small town, there are lifelong acquaintances who understand her.  Her son lives next door now, so at least he is of some help..  

I can see bits of myself in every story.  We all have stories to tell.  Sometimes I tell mine 2-3 times, so bear with me. These stories I read of other widow's journeys, they help me.  I have been psychoanalyzed so much, and unless I get suicidal, I won't get another counselor.  I don't trust their "learning from a book."  They need to have walked through the fire.  If these "layers" keep piling up, I might have to research again to find a counselor.  Right now I don't want one.  I do not feel "smarter" in the least, I just don't have trust right now. 

 

[Gwenivere]

I know I have become more sedentary over the last year.  When Steve died I was go go go in shock doing so many legal and neglected things from the years of dealing with the cancer.  This last year my body has caught up with my own physical challenges and the depression adding to lack of motivation.  I feel much older than 61.  I can't believe sometimes the amount of pain I live with daily and the fatigue.  I'll do one thing a day that is a biggie and call it good.  The bad part of being sedentary is the only time I don't feel pain is when I sit.  It's invading sleep now too.  There are many things I could try to ease this, but I just don't care as my mind might feel motivated one day but 'who cares' for days the next few.  There's no taking back the passage of time on some things like arthritis, but I don't even want to take small walks because so many things just feel lonely now.  It's a Catch 22.  I should stop smoking, but (to those who don't understand) it's something that I enjoy.  There are so many shoulds now.  Woke up and read Carrie Fisher died and just a couple days ago it was George Micheal.  Both younger than me.  It's sobering that we older ones are now truly in 'danger' from the things we only heard about long ago.  I now understand why my mother would get so sad when someone of her era would pass.  You didn't know them personally but they were a part of your generation that is shrinking.  Another person you didn't think of day to day,  but assumed would just always be there.  Intensifies the loss of the one we really thought would be there forever.

[Margm]

Someone asked me this morning didn't I miss my own washer and dryer.  I said "yes, but coming back and forth to the washateria is the only exercise I get."  I don't know why, but I have cried the whole morning over Carrie Fisher.  Her boldness about her bipolar, watching her in her one woman shows, reading her books, I felt like I had lost someone I knew and all the bottled up "non-crying" that I have done just came out in one wad of paper towels after another.  Had to be paper towels, Kleenex was too small.  

Gwen, I honestly think Billy's swallowing of that snuff he used for so many years helped poison him.  I cannot prove that.  He could not quit.  He quit smoking, his arteries were closing fast.  He could not give up his nicotine entirely though.  I did not stay after him.  Mama had a bumper sticker that read "I smoke and I vote."  Cigarettes, she called them her friends, and she certainly had no other friends.  She smoked till she was 95-years-old, from picking up "shorts" in the churchyard when her Mama was bed bound and sick for so long, no supervision, her and her brother started smoking then.  Little kids.  

3 hours ago, Gwenivere said:

 Intensifies the loss of the one we really thought would be there forever.

Maybe that is why we are so heart sick today.

ADDENDUM:  It is no one's business if you smoke.  It is your body.  If you get pleasure from cigarettes and you are not finding pleasure any other way, then smoke.  Myself, I think I will go buy new batteries........................nah, I didn't say that did I?  I'm just kidding.............or am I?  (I really am kidding), just threw it in there to show we can do what we want to.  (I still have some washateria money left).